Tailfin Tailspin

Now that Chrysler is once again a mainly American company, what kind of company will it be? The automaker was already planning to jettison 13,000 jobs, and the Cerberus takeover might cause some more upheaval. Plus, the issue of pensions and health care benefits - whose costs are both out of control - have to be addressed. Chrysler workers may be the biggest losers in the breakup of the merged firms of Chrysler and Daimler-Benz, which only proves the maxim that when a marriage is dissolved, the children are always the ones to suffer first and suffer most.

One issue about Chrysler that hasn't been addressed so much is the product itself. Seventy percent of Chrysler's sales have involved its Jeep line and the Dodge division's own light trucks, and - wouldn't you know it - American consumers are finally beginning to wake up about SUV's as gasoline hits three dollars a gallon and turning to more fuel-efficient cars, a market segment where Chrysler products are woefully lacking. Daimler's remaining 20 percent stake in the firm might help the company develop new product, but it will take time. Also at issue are DaimlerChrysler's previous joint projects with other companies, such as the minivan they've been working on with Volkswagen so VW can get a minivan in its U.S. showrooms for the first time since the EuroVan was retired four years ago, though that's not likely to be affected so much.

My local paper, though, noted that all of the Detroit automakers have been struggling with labor and product problems of late, and it also said that adding to those problems is the fact that "Toyota and other Asian manufacturers won the hearts of many U.S. consumers with that many view as more reliable, more fuel-efficient models."

It's a sentence that could have been written in 1980 to describe Detroit's problems then.